Building a good process into your company to receive a query, execute it against a read-only database, and shovel the results back to the user as a CSV file will pay dividends and is, honestly, pretty trivial in most cases.
Funnily enough, this is what I did, except I built an app where I write the queries as "pre-built" parameterized ones (sanitized, of course).
People still do a bunch of stuff in Excel, though, and every once in a while, it breaks, and I have to dig through the mess. Excel is great when it's just for yourself and you can manage it... it's a pain when others have to figure out someone else's.
https://github.com/ankane/blazer
Pretty easy to set up and share queries, dashboards, whatever